Career

Began painting professionally in the 1960s; worked as security guard,
Jewish Museum, New York, mid-1960s; had his first New York solo art show
at the Bykert Gallery, 1966.

Sidelights

Known as one of the most prolific modern-day abstract painters, Brice
Marden has been presenting his work at solo shows around the globe for
more than 40 years. During this time, art aficionados have watched Marden
transform his style over and over again. He first captured attention
during the 1960s with a series of muted monochrome single-panel paintings
featuring accidental drips. In the 1980s, his work was influenced by Asian
culture and incorporated calligraphy. By the 2000s, Marden had evolved
again, producing violently colorful paintings with spaghetti-like looping
lines. Regarded as one of the most influential painters of his time,
Marden's life work was featured in a 2006 retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His drawings have fetched a
half-million dollars at auction.

Marden's goal as a painter is to evoke both physical and emotional
reactions from viewers. The book
Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective
, published to accompany the exhibition of the same name, includes a
passage from Marden where he described his artistic intentions. Marden
said he hoped people would try to "see" his work and not
merely "look" at it. "Well, I do everything I can in
terms of what I put out for people to look at," Marden is quoted as
saying. "I mean I supply them with all of the information I
possibly can…. As in anything … the more responsive, the
more open, the more imaginative you are … the much better
experience it will be…. It's hard to look at paintings.
It's really difficult, a very strenuous kind of activity….
You have to think a lot. You have to be able to bring all sorts of things
together in your mind, your imagination, in your whole body."

A middle child, Marden was born Nicholas Brice Marden Jr. on October 15,
1938, in Bronxville, New York, to Nicholas and Kathryn Marden. His father
worked for a mortgage company. Marden was just seven years old when he had
his first memorable interaction with a piece of artwork. At the time, he
was at the Museum of Modern Art looking at some abstract modernist
sculptures created by Roman artist Constantin Brancusi. "I
didn't know anything about it, but I had this feeling that there
was much more to it than what I was seeing," he told Barbara
Isenberg of the
Los Angeles Times
.

There were no artistic influences in Marden's immediate family, but
he befriended a friend's father, Fred Serginian, who oversaw an ad
agency art department and painted on the side. Throughout Marden's
childhood, Serginian advised him to connect with his artist side. In the
book
Plane Image
, Marden noted that Serginian was "always very encouraging,
especially when I started out in art school. My parents were just totally
perplexed, you know, coming from a town where everybody goes to college, a
very Ivy League kind of place…. And I had come from this Princeton
family, my grandfather taught there, and my father … and my brother
went there and I always wanted to go there. But then I decided I
didn't want to go."

Instead of heading off to an Ivy League school as his parents had
expected, Marden chose to attend Florida Southern College with the idea
that he would take some art courses for a year to see if he was truly
interested in studying art as a profession. When Marden went away to
college, Serginian gave him a subscription to
Art News
magazine, which featured the work of abstract expressionists and got
Marden's mind reflecting on the genre. Marden lasted only one year
in Florida. After that, he transferred to the Boston University School of
Fine and Applied Arts, earning his B.F.A. in 1961.

Marden loved being in Boston, a metropolitan area dotted with museums and
galleries which was also within driving distance of New York. For Marden,
a weekend consisted of going to New York, visiting a dozen galleries on
Saturday and a couple of museums on Sunday before heading back to Boston.
During this time, Marden focused his work on portraits and still lifes.
Besides immersing himself in the area's art scene, Marden became
involved with the Cambridge, Massachusetts, folk music scene. He met Bob
Dylan and Pete Seeger. In 1960, he married Pauline Baez, sister of the
folk singer/songwriter Joan Baez.

During the summer of 1961, Marden attended the Yale Summer School of Music
and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut. Marden focused his attention on
landscapes and abstracts, feeling like he had permission to paint whatever
he wanted without limitations. At the end of the session, he was invited
to enroll at Yale University's School of Art and Architecture.
During this time, Marden stopped drawing figures and began to focus on
abstract works. He also began to experiment with dividing his canvas into
a four-part grid to help him organize elements within a piece.

Marden earned his M.F.A. in 1963, then moved to New York City, set up a
studio and began to paint. In order to earn money and support his family,
which now included a son, Marden took a part-time job as a guard at the
Jewish Museum. The impressionable Marden was lucky enough to be employed
at the museum in 1964 when it hosted a Jasper Johns retrospective. Johns
was famous for his abstract work that incorporated concrete popular images
and everyday objects. Johns' work paved the way for pop artists
like Andy Warhol and had an immense effect on Marden. "I knew about
this stuff, but it's one thing to know about it and another to be
in a room with 30 Jasper Johns all day long," Marden told the
Los Angeles Times'
Isenberg. "You'd be there during the day, and at night in a
bar discussing it. Then back the next day with questions buzzing in your
mind. It was really incredible."

In 1964, Marden created his first monochromatic single-panel painting,
which would become a trademark of his. Two years later, in 1966, Marden
hosted his first New York City solo show at the Bykert Gallery and made an
impression on the art world. Marden took a new approach for the paintings
in this show, devising a new technique in which he mixed together paint,
turpentine, and melted beeswax to reduce the shine of the oil. When
applying this sticky concoction, he used spatulas, knives and brushes,
causing oozy irregularities as the paint sagged a bit before hardening.

The paintings featured in this show were abstract in nature. The titles,
however, were concrete and offered viewers a way to connect with the
underpinnings of each work. One painting, "Nebraska,"
featured exquisite greens and was inspired by a drive through the
state's prairies. After the show, he painted a standout piece
titled "For Helen," made in honor of Helen Harrington, whom
Marden later married. This piece featured two panels, each the height of
Harrington's body and width of her shoulders.

By 1968, Marden's pieces featured multiple panels. He continued to
work with grids, especially influenced by the grids of New York City.
Everywhere
he looked, Marden found grids—both vertical and
horizontal—in the streets, the buildings, and the cracks in the
concrete. Throughout his career, Marden's work has been directly
influenced by where he paints. During the late 1960s, as he lived in the
city, he was influenced by the grid. In 1971, however, Marden traveled to
the Greek island of Hydra, located in the Aegean Sea. He fell so in love
with the area that he later bought a house there and opened a studio.
Marden travels there every summer to paint, and when he does, the colors
in his work become more intense. The pieces are grander and more lush, a
direct correlation to the vibrancy he feels there. Later in his career,
Marden was painting from a studio in the dark, forested area of Sullivan
County, Pennsylvania. The work he produced at this studio tended to be
dim.

In 1974, a collection of Marden's drawings traveled to the
Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Fort Worth Art Museum in Texas
and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 1975, the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York hosted a retrospective of Marden's paintings and
drawings. In the late 1970s, Marden traveled to Rome and Pompeii, studying
Greek and Roman architecture. The trip influenced his work for several
years to come and is apparent in a piece titled "Thira,"
which he painted in 1979 and 1980. In "Thira," he joined 18
separate rectangles of different sizes and colors to make a piece 15 feet
long and eight feet high. He joined the rectangles together to mimic the
post-and-lintel—or post and beam—construction of ancient
Greek architecture.

During the 1980s, Marden played around with broadening his signature
style. He was sick of doing the same thing over and over again. Unsure of
what to do, Marden stopped painting to re-examine his direction. He
traveled extensively, trying to take in everything he saw. A trip to
Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India changed the course of Marden's work.
In Thailand, he became more in sync with nature. He sketched seashells,
taking note of their markings and patterns. An interest in Asian culture
led him to calligraphy and eventually, a study of the poems of Han Shan,
an eighth-century Taoist/Zen Chinese poet whose name means "Cold
Mountain."

As Marden began painting again, he moved away from his minimalist approach
and began churning out expressive abstracts. The series of paintings he
crafted between 1988 and 1991 are known as the Cold Mountain series and
directly reflect the influence of Asian culture. These pieces are larger
than his previous ones, with canvases measuring nine by 12 feet. The
paintings feature rows of abstract symbols and the marks veer off in
different weights and directions, as in calligraphy. By this time, Marden
had given up the practice of mixing beeswax into his paints and was
instead using terpineol, an oil that dries flat. Using the terpineol,
Marden did not have to fight with the canvas as much. The terpineol was
runnier than his wax-and-paint mixture, allowing him to paint with a
looser arm and wrist. The terpineol allowed him to use long brushes he
could swirl across the canvas. The colors, however, remained muted.

From October of 2006 to January of 2007, Marden's work was the
subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition
featured 56 of his paintings and 50 of his drawings, organized in
chronological order. Marden unveiled two new large-scale works for the
exhibition, titled "The Propitious Garden of Plane Image."
He used two editions of the painting for the show—the second and
third. This work again shows an evolution in Marden's style. The
paintings feature a heightened use of color, which has been a signature of
the past few years. The "Propitious Garden" painting was
inspired by the number six after a numerologist friend told Marden that
was his number. Marden explained his reasoning this way to the
Los Angeles Times'
Iseberg: "I was born on the 15th; 1 plus 5 equals 6. I use six
panels in these paintings, and each panel is 6 by 4 feet, which is 24,
which also adds up to 6. There are six colors and six variations."
While this might seem an odd way to begin a picture, Marden believes an
artist has to start somewhere.

Another interesting trait of Marden's work is the use of twigs,
instead of brushes, to paint with. This is something Matisse did as well.
Marden first began using twigs from the ailanthus trees of his New York
back yard. He has also used bamboo and hemlock, or whatever else he finds
during his travels. When Marden starts a piece, he may use a branch
several feet long. By the end of the piece, as Marden zooms in on his
focus, he paints with shorter, blunter sticks.

Marden's other eccentricities include working on paintings even
after he has released them for a show. For Marden,
"finished" can be a temporary state. According to Garrels in
Plane Image
, Marden once said, "When the painting really lives, has a right to
exist on its own strengths and weaknesses, I consider it finished. When I
have put all I can into it and it really breathes, I stop. There are times
when a work has pulled ahead of me and goes on to become something new to
me, something that I have never seen before; that is finishing in an
exhilarating way."